


Breaking Bonnie Bennett

by diaryofdreams



Category: BDSM - Fandom, The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: 1994 Prison World (Vampire Diaries), BDSM, Bonkai, Community: bdsm_fandom, F/M, Heavy BDSM
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 20:54:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29615283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diaryofdreams/pseuds/diaryofdreams
Summary: My dark and weird, emotionally driven tale of Bonnie and Kai falling in love. Body, mind, and spirit (in that order).Told in two chapters.Based on season 6, with some alternate endings. First fanfiction.
Relationships: Bonnie Bennett/Malachai "Kai" Parker
Comments: 5
Kudos: 14





	1. Breaking Bonnie Bennett

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prison worlds cannot hold Kai anymore, giving him free reign to obtain everything he wants - including Bonnie as a pet.

**A Brief Disclaimer:**

**Please do not read if you do not want to read content labeled in this story's tags and warnings (listed above), or if you are uncomfortable with brief references to drug usage and themes of trauma recovery.**

**This is a work of paranormal fan-fiction that is based on a work of paranormal fiction. All characters, settings, and events depicted are fictitious. Thank you!**

...

Chapter I.

"Breaking Bonnie Bennett" 

_The wound is the place where the Light enters you. - Rumi_

Part 1. "Portals of Grace."

Damon was gone.

Kai had escaped.

And I was frozen in time.

The moon was high and bright; cold and sharp, and clear. And the night was all black, starless void. 

It borders on impossible to fully explain the slow and horrific process of the mind falling apart in complete solitude.

Memories became fractured and reeling, bordering illusion; thoughts were trapped and pensive, weighting the skull. Life feels like endless time stretching out before you, vast and meaningless - incomprehensible. The brain aches as it rots into hell...I've never felt migraines quite like these. Movement flutters in the corner of your eye, only for you to turn and see that no one is there and you are simply losing your mind. The mind starts to feel like a tangible thing that you can feel slipping through your fingers, and the heart sinks like a stone in the dark. All of this, because we were not created to be alone forever. 

Like every other night, I spent this particular night shivering in a bed that was not my own. The bedding was soft and plush, and moonlight poured in gently through tall windows; all the beauty in the world was mine for the taking except for the only kind that mattered. I decided to run a hot bath, filled to the brim, so that warmth could sink in from the outside. 

With vestigial magic coursing through my veins, I had grown out my old haircut. I was tired of it, and long hair is warming and comforting for me. It gives me a way to hide my face when I'm too sad to show it. That is what I needed now, so I grew it down to my hips. It billowed around my narrow bones and soft bits of flesh like a dark veil, and I felt safer beneath it. 

The feathery veil covered my breasts and pelvis as I lay in the bath tub, sinking in the stinging hot water. The air was waterlogged and thick with steam. I silenced my mind until I was nothing but a wisp of a girl - damp hair plastered to dusky skin, hollow gaze fixed on nothing. 

And then a small but sharp metallic sound penetrated the still, watery air. 

I refocused my gaze to check my surroundings. Kai had materialized in the bathroom and was now looking me in the eye from a short distance away, perched casually on the bathroom counter and toying with a black leather belt. The silver buckle occasionally made a clinking sound. 

I instinctively crossed my arms to hide my breasts, but relaxed when I realized that they had been covered all along. 

He was wearing dark charcoal gray pants and a black shirt that was still runched at the hem, revealing a pale band of muscle that trailed into his unbelted jeans.

He smiled at me. It was falsely pleasant, the way you would expect a sociopath to smile at you when you both know you're vulnerable and he's not. 

"What are you doing here?!" I gasped. "Aren't you supposed to be out causing trouble somewhere else?" 

"I'm taking a break. I'm bored," he said. 

I rolled my eyes in frustration. There had to be a million other things he could be doing right now, and I didn't understand why ruining my bath ranked at all on his priority list.

"Come here, Bonnie," he said in a low, teasing voice, holding his hand out as if I would actually come. 

"Go away," I sighed.

He ignored this. The fake pleasant smile faded as he said, "Motus." 

My body betrayed me, slowly rising from the water to walk toward him. I knew what was happening - he was using magic on me - but there was nothing I could do to stop it. An invisible aura of power around his skin felt like a subtle magnetic field. It made the air around him thicker, and my blood flushed closer to the skin as I drew near him. I recognized this sensation, recalling how it felt to stand on certain hallowed ground: the site of the witches' massacre in Mystic Falls. He must have absorbed the energy of many witches, giving him so much power that he was no longer a subject of time.

So I stood in front of him, completely naked and wet. The only barrier between him and the most private parts of my body was my hair. His gaze dropped down from my face and lingered on skin he wasn't meant to see, and I had never felt more humiliated than this. Every inch of my skin tingled involuntarily, reacting to his supercharged aura.

Tears stung at my eyes, but I did not let one escape. This, too, was an involuntary response. A thousand suppressed emotions came flooding into my heart through this mortification. None of this was fair. 

"Why are you doing this?" I asked him.

He was standing now, playing absently with a lock of my hair. 

"Because I want to," he said simply. As if it were the most obvious answer in the world. 

"You're trying to embarrass me," I said. It was difficult to speak at all from this position, but I did it anyway.

He laughed. "I don't think you fully understand the position you're in, Bonnie." 

"What position am I in?" I asked.

In response to my question, he cupped my chin in his hands. From there, he slowly trailed his hands down my neck, pausing in the valley between my breasts. He parted his hands, sweeping my hair aside and exposing me completely. 

And then without warning, he slung the belt around my neck and tightened it. 

I should have seen something like this coming - why else would Kai take off his belt? - but it was too late. 

At first, he had fun mocking me with fake gasps. But then his expression changed as he watched the physiological effects of his belt around my neck unfold. Water poured from my eyes and my breasts heaved. There was no way to keep my balance like this, so my hands automatically grasped the nearest thing for support. That is how I ended up with my knees slightly buckled, with one hand weakly on his arm for support. 

His cruel, mischievous stance gave way to something else.

He used the belt to pull me so close to him that I was pressed roughly into his solid body, and I felt a hard bulge beneath his pants on my skin.

It was arousing for him to see me like this, tear-streaked and wimpering. I tried to think of how Kai must have dealt with being trapped here for so long, and felt certain that this punishment must have left him alone with his darkness festering.

Before my vision went completely black, he loosened the belt. He watched my eyes as he did so. As my head and airway cleared up, so did he. 

"I'm going to tie you down now," he said steadily. 

I hesitated to ask,

"Are you going to rape me?"

"Repeatedly," he said.

I wasn't particularly afraid of death. I had already died briefly before, catching glimpses of another world. 

The prospect of being raped, however, was new. 

"Are you going to kill me?"

"Not on purpose," he said. "Not permanently." 

"Why?" 

"I already know I can kill you if I want to. But I'd rather break you instead," he said calmly. 

"What do you stand to gain from that?" 

"You." 

...

My days went like this:

The heavy footfalls of Kai's boots signaled that he had come back for me, and it was time to hide. He had found a way to weave in and out of this world by magic, existing in this timeline and the next. 

He cast a spell to keep me confined to the house - he didn't want to have to hunt me down all over the country. But he was fine with playing a game of hide-and-seek within the house. He found me every time, sometimes greeting me with a casual wink that meant "game over". To a casual observer, we would have looked like two lovers engaged in a game we should have outgrown, but were more charming for it. 

When he found me, he fastened around my neck the collar that I kept taking off.

It was actually rather pretty - a thin oxidized silver band intricately engraved with flowers. A simple, silver heart with a keyhole hung from its center. It shimmered beautifully in the light.

"I've missed you, my pet," he said. 

"I will escape here one day."

"I know you will," he tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. "But tonight, you belong to me."

I won't discuss the details of what happened after that.

Eventually, I stopped removing the collar in his absence. At first, removing it was an important symbol of resistance... until it felt like a silly gesture, considering the reality. I grew less and less confident that I could ever escape here myself. I tried to make him happy by yielding to him, hoping he would eventually trust me enough to release me on his own.

He took notice of this, and things became better for me. There was still pain - Kai was not a gentle lover, to put it lightly. I remembered him saying once, _"pain is so pretty on a girl"_. But he rewarded my submission with a prettier existence. 

When I asked if he would ever let me leave, he said "You are exactly where you're supposed to be. Now come here, Bonnie. Keep me happy."

After soaking the sheets with my tears and his sweat, he would spend his exhaustion holding me and stroking my hair until I stopped crying and the sun set over the distant horizon, bathing the room in dim chypre light.

"How are you feeling?" he asked when I was quiet. "Its dark in here, isn't it?"

Heavy silence.

"Well, I'm here with you," he said.

He brought me potions in glass amphora vials. This was one of his gifts to me - a way to soften the pain.

When I drank the clear liquid, everything became hazy and dreamlike, leaving my body flushed and glowing like a hearth. It was a witch's brew of ecstasy and laudalum, turning the searing pain into warm pressure. He told me it was a family recipe, hidden somewhere in the pages of the Gemini coven's Book of Shadows. It was meant to kill pain.

Sometimes, Kai would visit me when he was in pain himself. He had searing migraines, a lasting effect of the time he spent frozen here. On those days, all he wanted to do was drown in the bed with me in a dark room. The "witch's laudalum" worked like alchemy on our pain, and we were locked in a sleeping embrace like sick, drugged versions of Romeo and Juliet. 

He brought my favorite candies back with him from the "real world", just a few at a time so I wouldn't grow bored. We listened to music together, laying on the floor.

I realized, with fright, that I had never in my life been so sad... or so happy. I could not bear to consciously admit this to myself, but I wanted him to find me here and speak to me... I wanted to hear him, and feel him. My mind did everything it could to make the experience more digestible, including forcing me to notice things about Kai that I did not allow myself to see before. Being aware that he was "breaking me" exactly as he intended to did not make it any less effective.

Over time, allowed myself to finally face what had lurked in the shadows of my mind all along, because suddenly they were like candles in the dark:

His eyes were perfect. Hazel and intense, there was always something behind them. Like secrets, or the hint of a threat to come. 

I realized how much I loved the facial hair along his angular jaw line, and how comforting it was to feel the layer of flesh over the hard core of his biceps. 

The sum of all of it - suffering and sweetness, ecstasy and peace, bonding and isolation - I could only describe it as feeling sublime. 

We started to have fun with it, and my favorite headband was a pair of fuzzy black cat's ears. 

I was limited to music that had already come out by 1994, and I had fallen in love with the song "In Your Room" by Depeche Mode, from the album "Songs of Faith and Devotion", because its lyrics were singing my life. The song was about the intimate control of a captor over his captive.

"In your room  
Where time stands still,  
Or moves at your will  
Will you let the morning come soon,  
Or will you leave me lying here?  
In your favorite darkness,  
Your favorite half-light,  
Your favorite consciousness;  
Your favorite slave..."

When he kissed me goodbye, off to sow his mischief in the "real world", I had nothing to do but call magic back to me.

It took a long time, and it felt like trying to ignite a spark from a long-dead flame. But eventually, I won.

The thrill of seeing a white candle spring to light with fire under my gaze sent my heart soaring. Free at last, God almighty, Free at last! 

And then I was gone. 

...

The others were glad to see that I was still alive, after all.

Returning to Mystic Falls felt like stepping into a sunlit memory. Everything was just as I remembered it: The town square brimmed with people, the air was saturated with smells of food and gasoline, and I could hear music in the distance. Everything was just as it should have been, and yet I was so disoriented by everything. I felt like an astronaut just returning from orbit. I had not expected this. Whenever I pictured myself finally escaping from the time loop, I always imagined walking back into my old life with nothing but relief. But the reality was different, and my body needed time to adjust. 

Kai was now the fully-merged head of the Gemini coven and was off doing God-knows-what. Surely, he knew I had escaped by now. I had a feeling he would find me again, but there was nothing I could do about it. I realized that Kai must have had a difficult time adjusting, too, at first.

The first thing I did was return to my empty home.

Without realizing it, my mind had released this place. I was gone from it for so long with no hope of returning to it that I had simply shoved it out of my mind. Seeing it now was like seeing a memory from a dream, one that was not good or bad but simply familiar. 

The only way to describe it was "dirty white". Dishes left in the cracked, white porcelain sink after my sudden disappearance collected flies. Old, white bathroom tiles were bordered with mold. Every light surface was dusty, and even the pictures seemed faded. Tidying up the place was a good distraction, as well as a good excuse for not immediately going to see anyone.

I was with Damon one hazy afternoon. He told me everything I had missed as we walked side-by-side through the crumbling cemetery, overgrown with ivy and moss. It was one place where we could talk in peace and quiet. He had brought me here to ask me if I would work together with Kai one more time, going with him to one more prison world of the past, because his mother needed something or people would die. 

"Everything is always a matter of life or death with you vampires," I sighed in a tired but joking tone. "I might do it anyway."

He looked surprised, but relieved that I didn't say more about it.

Everyone, including Damon, thought I had changed since returning from the past. They would not say it in front of me, but it looked to them like I had withdrawn from the world. I mostly did not want to see anyone, not out of animosity but because I'd rather just look at the sky or the surface of a pond and think or feel or remember, but not speak. Damon joked that I had gotten on his nerves for months, then come back a mute. 

The weather was sweltering hot and I didn't have anywhere to go for a while, so I joined Damon on this walk wearing a small chemise with a simple, opaque tulle robe thrown over, both colored like toasted biscotti. I was used to being alone now and Damon had seen me in pajamas or various states of undress for months, so an ensemble like this didn't matter. I felt safe around him. But the wind picked up as we walked, blessing us with a pleasurably cool breeze. 

Parts of my robe came askew in the wind, revealing my shoulder and thigh. Normally, this would not have been a big deal. In the more carefree childhood that was now past, Caroline and Elena and I would have worn matching tank tops and short shorts around this time of year, revealing those parts anyway without even thinking about it. 

But now there were rope marks along my arms, wrists, and legs where I had been tied down countless times. There were healing slits from lacerations cut in neat lines down my thigh. Now, my skin was a vulgar thing.

When Damon saw the kind of wounds I had, I saw the puzzle working itself out in his head. Honestly, it wasn't a very hard one to solve; most telling of all was the battered skin between my legs. All of it was clearly the work of Kai, and it had gone on for months. 

"Kai came back to torture you," he said.

"Yes," I nodded once.

There was a loaded silence, then Damon couldn't meet my eyes anymore. 

"Bonnie, did he..." 

"I don't want to talk about that," I said firmly but gently.

Damon didn't push it, thank God. He just hugged me for a long time, and then let me go. With the understanding that we weren't going to talk about it, he met my eyes again.

"I understand if you're scared of Kai," he said. His arctic blue eyes were penetrating and sincere. He needed me to go, badly, but he could see why I might not go. 

I paused for a moment, searching my heart for the right words to describe how I felt. I settled on something simple: "I don't think he'll kill me. So I'll see what he says." 

He did not press the issue.

The question of whether we would meet again was never an "if" - it was always a "when".

I smiled at the heavy-handedness of fate.

"Hello?" Damon said, waving a hand in front of my face. I must have gone spacey again.

"Sorry," I blinked. I smiled at him, but my mind was still elsewhere.

Damon's cell phone rang, and he paused to see who it was. He furrowed his brow.

Sensing a polite exit, I said "I think I'll go home now." 

...

Two days later, I waited for Kai at the Mystic Grill. 

This place and Matt Donovan were like comforting touchstones of reality.

I realized, with sadness, that I didn't quite belong here. None of us supernatural folk did, because we caused chaos every time we showed up. It really did seem like the matters of vampires and witches were more suited to a place that was private, dark and grandiose. Like the Salvatore house, where one would expect there to be blood over dinner and no rule of law.

Kai sauntered in, looking to all the world like just another bright young man.

He slid into the opposite seat, looking genuinely pleased to see me.

"Bonnie," he said affectionately. The vowels of my name rolled off his tongue as if the word itself gave him pleasure. 

His eyes fell from my face to my neck, and for the first time since arriving back to the real world, I realized that it never occurred to me to remove my collar. I half-expected him to say "my pet". 

With some embarrassment, I briefly raised a hand to the locking heart, as if I could hide it. But I folded my hands in my lap again. No one else knew what it symbolized; to them, it was just a gothic-looking choker. 

We both ordered drinks.

Most of our meeting was filled with levity. Neither of us wanted anything heavy on the mind just then. I wasn't sure of what to do with my life anymore, and I suspected that he wasn't either - now that he had obtained the highest power and done nothing with it for several days, he was finally showing me what he had been up to...

Kai loved social media. He had a profile on every major site and already had plenty of faceless followers. He was almost like a child with it, taking pictures of everything in sight, including me. 

This vapid side of him was oddly comforting. 

And this vapid side of me was actually relaxing. I giggled at jokes that weren't particularly funny just because they were jokes. When he flirted with me, I flirted back in the cheesiest way possible, and this also became a joke. 

Eventually, I told him of Damon's proposal. 

He said, "Sure. I'll go if you go." 

At home that evening, I briefly wondered what kind mischief Kai was up to now. Or if he was getting into any trouble at all - he could be uploading pictures of his pizza to the internet, or murdering someone out of boredom.

Sleep overtook me until dawn.

...

As I promised Damon I would, I had convinced Kai to help me bring the rest of his mother's family back to the present. We had come to seek them in a world that was like a snow-globe.

This time, I remembered to remove my collar. I wore a dress that I thought was rather pretty - short rosy brown, ethereal mohair with red ribbon lacing up the bodice. It was warm, but light as air and riding the border between translucency and opacity. I wore matching arm and leg warmers with my lips tinted softly red, like the ribbon. Not a solid or bright red that tended to look clownish on me, but sheer bloody red. 

That morning in the bath tub, I had a flashback. I was in the past again, remembering a time when Kai commanded me to take off my clothes and take a bath with him. He wanted me to sit straddled on his lap in the water, so I did. 

At some point, he did something that made my lips darken with blood. I think he must have hit me, but I was too in and out of consciousness to be sure. Then cruelly he kissed me, tasting blood. When he drew back, his eyes adored me. It was the sick inspiration for today's makeup. 

The snow was beautiful, and it felt nearly meditative to walk through it in speechless reverence. Kai was so silent that I barely noticed him walking in the snow beside me.

In that moment, the details of my circumstances - the fact that I was running an errand for Damon, the fact that I was now standing in another prison world, the fact of being alone with Kai for the first time since my escape, and the bitter cold ... all of these things melted away to nothing. 

I had every right to weep about the way my life had gone. The life of an orphaned witch. 

But in that moment, I decided not to. I didn't like being sad, not really. And I had a psychic hunch that it wasn't the right way to be. Everyone in Mystic Falls has lost so much that we all have a right to sorrow about many things. Deaths. But I would rather attune my senses to what makes me feel the way I'd like to feel... calm, warm, and somewhat happy. In this life, things like that are so scarce and endangered that they should be treasured.

The cold wind whipped my hair across my face. The remnants of long-dead leaves caught in its length. This made me smile.

I focused on the radiant white snow. The elegant black lines of dead trees jutting out from the ice. The pale sky, and the quietness of this long-abandoned world. The sound of Kai's boots crunching in the snow. 

"Bonnie." 

I turned and looked up at Kai, who stood taller than me. 

I was struck by the intensity of his eyes. The cold, happy mask had melted out of them to reveal something else. Longing and vulnerable. 

"I'm sorry for hurting you," he said. "I just want you to know that. It keeps me up at night, knowing what I did. I want you to forgive me." 

I hesitated for a long time, feeling like a deer in headlights with no idea of what to say. Merging with Luke intensified Kai's emotions, but he was still the same person.

Suddenly, he grabbed my arm and screamed my name. _Bonnie!_

He was angry, but underneath it was something else - the fear of losing something. 

Kai did not take "no" for an answer, and he did not like losing his things. I was one of his things.

His pet had run away, and he didn't know how to coax it back to him.

Merging with Luke had not made him less of himself. It made him more intensely himself.

He felt volatile and more dangerous with emotions, not less. 

I winced as he grabbed my wrist with such power coursing through his veins that he broke it. The black leather gloves he wore felt harsh and sharply cold on my skin. The whole thing sent a physical shock pulsing up my arm and down my spine. It was too much, and I could not keep my face neutral. When he saw the shock, fear and pain in my eyes, he released me and took a few steps back. I slumped back against a tree. 

"I'm sorry," he breathed. He repeated himself over and over until it was just a whispered chant.

I ran my delicate fingers over the sprained wrist with clinical detachment. 

I looked up at him. As his pet, I knew him intimately. He was visibly conflicted - horrified at this accident, but also trying to suppress the side of him that felt drawn to it. 

"I forgive you, Kai," I said. "For everything. I understand." 

When he heard this, his gaze softened. 

In a gesture unexpected even to me, I held out my sprained hand to him.

He smiled briefly, with a softness that surprised and somehow touched me - it was a a contrast to his usual impish smirk that meant you should probably be afraid.

He came to me and wrapped me up, helping me keep my balance in the snow. The pain was distracting, and I was afraid I'd fall without the support of a tree in such high snow. So Kai held me as we walked, supporting me instead. He was happy to be my tree.

Being this close to him made me remember the strangest things. Like his liquid warmth seeping out of me and soaking my inner thigh, as I drifted off to sleep in his arms, in another world. His black leather gloves felt hard and cold where he clenched my arms, but this was comforting just because it was Kai.

We were quiet again, but this silence had a different quality. Instead of being quiet to keep bad things at bay - like sadness, and fear - we were quiet because we were relieved. Everything that needed to be said had been said. And now, we had only our task before us: to work together to bring Lily's family back to the present. 

...

We had all returned safely to the present. Lily and her family had left Mystic Falls without incident, to find their own settlement and do their best to live in peace. 

So I lay alone in bed that night, staring at the moon through my window. I wore a small lilac slip, but lay wrapped in layers of blankets. 

I had left my window open to let the warm summer night's air come in as I slept, but I could not sleep. My mind kept humming with how many changes had occurred so quickly that it was hard for my mind to keep up. 

Jeremy had left Mystic Falls forever. I made no attempt to contact him, or vice versa. I knew it was for the best. Jeremy was human, and he deserved a chance to live as other humans lived. To drag him back into this supernatural drama when he had finally escaped, would be cruel. He wanted to go, and I had to release him.

Magic could be wonderful, and horrible. My parents knew this, which is why they both ran from it, running away from their witch-daughter in the process. My father had briefly returned to Mystic Falls, only to leave again soon after. Even when he was here it felt like he was slowly distancing himself from me again, too afraid to become emotionally invested in a daughter who lived by magic and might die by it. 

I wondered if love between supernatural and natural humans could endure at all. Elena had once been human, but was now a vampire like her lover. The same was true of Caroline. And Jeremy was lucky to have escaped Mystic Falls with his mortal life. Matt Donovan was a smart man: he would not be romantically involved with any of us long-term.

All of this coalesced into the present situation: I was completely and utterly alone again. 

Once upon a time, this loneliness would have driven me to tears. 

But the Bonnie that existed before was different from the one that existed now. I could not tell you the specifics of how this had come to be, but I felt more beautiful and serene. Something had developed within me that saw how pointless it was to be anything but that, no matter what.

As I lay in bed, I stared at the lone, high moon through my window and realized that this moment was art. This painting was meant to be lonely and unfair, dark and moonlit. Every brushstroke of the present had fallen exactly where it was meant to be. To believe otherwise was to imply that God had made a mistake, which was absurd because he does not make mistakes. I was lonely now, but not always.

And with that thought, I drifted off to sleep.

...

When I woke up, the alarm clock on my nightstand read 5:32 am. Pale morning light filtered in through the window. My small body felt very warm and bundled up, and much better. As I lay there, my consciousness slowly increasing in clarity, I felt that someone's arm was wrapped around my waist. Abruptly, I realized that someone was "spooning" me. 

I rested my hand calmly on top of his and did not move. In this hypnagogic trance - a state suspended between waking and dreaming - his body felt like blanket around me, warm and heavy. 

We laid like that for almost an hour. His body warmed mine, and we shared energies through our hands. It was a very intimate thing, and the fact that I appeared to be alseep felt oddly freeing... witches don't just gather information through the eyes, clairvoyance. We can also gather information through the other senses - sound, smell, taste, touch; clairaudience, clairalience, clairgustance, and clairsentience. 

I kept my eyes closed and focused on his skin touching mine, letting impressions come to me. For a while, my mind was blank and there was nothing.

Then suddenly, a rush of emotions ran through me like a gush of warm water - my heart felt like raw tissue coming apart at the seams, my skin flushed, and a terrible yearning ache welled up inside my center with such intensity that it felt like burning.

I opened my eyes and inhaled sharply, suddenly tearing my hand away from his just to break part of the overwhelming connection. I crouched into the mattress, gripping the bed-sheets to steady my body and anchor my mind to the present. I had never felt something like that before... desire, incarnate. 

I looked down at Kai's arm, wrapped possessively around my tiny waist. The rest of his body lay pressed into me from behind. We still hadn't moved, and I could feel the warmth of his breath descending upon the top of my head.

I did not know what to say, knowing how he felt.

Kai's desire to leave his irreversible mark on my body and mind has always been self-evident. But through the connection, I realized that I had also marked him with myself, in my own way. For a moment, I saw myself as he saw me. He adored me. 

I just laid there in his arms, hiding beneath my hair. I traced his hand around my waist with my index finger, feeling along his veins.

He raised a hand to gently brush the curtain of my hair back from my face and stroke the side of my cheek. He started to speak. 

"When you were trapped in the past with that vampire and I was invisible, I crawled into bed beside you like this every single night. And on those nights, I felt at peace for the first time in my life."

I remained silent, slowly absorbing what he was telling me.

He lowered his fingers to my neck, grazing the skin from behind. "I watched you through foggy showers, and touched your back so lightly that you thought I was water running down your skin." 

I did not feel either violation or flattery. I only listened, accepting without judging.

He continued, "Since returning to the world, I've tried to recreate that feeling by sleeping beside other girls. But it isn't the same. I thought that having all of these powers and becoming the head of the Gemini coven would make me feel complete, but after a few days I realized that power isn't everything I want. Bonnie, I want you."

I could feel the uneasiness in his voice - it was difficult for someone like him to say these things out loud. I turned to face him. My breath hitched when our eyes met, and his lips were drawn into a hard line as he awaited my response.

"I feel at peace beside you, too," I answered. 

And that was the truth. Being in Kai's arms felt good and right. 

In this moment - in this singular, potent, private moment - I realized that I didn't feel like a lone puzzle piece in this world anymore, trying to make myself fit where I didn't quite belong. He was a witch, like me. He was a stronger witch than me, in fact. He could hurt or abuse me, but he could also protect me if he wanted to. In truth, I did not feel seen or alive until he broke something in my soul; a crack through which I could let love in. He had ripped a gaping wound to my ghost in the shell, just to see inside and claim it for his own. 

We had handled our lives differently, but we were essentially twin souls. Our parents rejected us for what we were. We had both hardened ourselves to the fact that no one cared much about us with futile resentment in my case, or deadly sociopathy in his. We both knew the burden of leadership - I was the last living Bennett witch, and people always came to lay their burdens on me whenever they needed a witch from my bloodline. He was the leader of the Gemini coven, which carried its own set of burdens. I was finally in the arms of the one person in the world who could not only recognize my loneliness, but was the cure for it. He was my missing piece, and with him the canvas of my life took on a different color. 

I was in love with him.  
He was not safe, or good, but "is he safe and good?" was not the right question.  
The right question was: "Is he worth the risk?"  
My answer, without hesitation now, was "Yes."

I turned to face him and placed my hand on his chest beneath the covers. I was attempting something new; I could not find words that were good enough to express what I felt. So I used magic to send my emotions to him. 

I wanted him to know that he silenced my restless heart. That every time he bedded me, I became so weak in the knees that I could not stand. That I missed him, and did not want to spend another night without him.

I watched his eyes as he processed all of that, and more.

He looked down at me and said, "I love you, too, Bonnie." 

I smiled, and this was my first genuine smile since returning to the present day.

In one deft movement, he positioned himself on top of me and kissed me deeply, holding my head in his hands. The way he kissed me reached all the way down to my heart because it was greedy for me, as if he thought he could drink me.

And I, in return, felt a similar desire. I wanted more of him than his tongue, and he could feel it. 

He looked fervently into my eyes and caught his breath to say, "Do you want me inside you?" 

"Yes," I whispered. 

I had been his before that night. But now, I was rightfully his.

...

Kai made me fall in love with being a witch, for the first time in my life.

I disappeared from everything and everyone - no school or work, "family" or "friends", missions or fears. I took a hiatus from everyone and everything, except for Kai. 

He knew how to have fun. Sociopaths usually do, because they are not inhibited by things like shame or embarrassment. He could feel now, but he was not at the mercy of every human feeling. Only what pulled him the strongest mattered, such as love.

The most amazing thing about him was the fact that everything still had a sense of newness to him. He was cuttingly intelligent, so he could immediately sense the function of things he had never seen before. But he was also a mystic, in the sense that he was still mystified by things. 

His way of mastering a thing and then becoming fascinated with its inner workings spilled over into the way he touched me.

I could never forget when he decided to spend a night in Vegas for his birthday, and dragged me along. Kai had developed a fixation with card games. I was not interested in playing any of them, but I was dazzled by the lights. The night seemed more saturated there, with women in stripes of bright fabrics and revealed skins, and mens' faces were alight with the kind of thrill that only comes from risk. The air itself was alive and swirling with smoke and music. 

For his birthday, I had gotten him something I knew he'd like the minute I saw it: a hand knife shaped like a katana. It looked like it belonged in his hand, and it cut with the sharp precision of a scalpel. 

Once again, I was Kai's pet. I was never to remove my silver heart, and I earnestly believed he would kill me if I ever did that again. I said "yes" to him when given a choice for the first time that night in my bed, even wrapped my legs around him for good measure. And he took that with the weight of an oath.

Instead of leading me by the hand, he led by a hand on the back of my neck. In public, his kiss was less a display of love and more about possession - whenever other men looked me over, he kissed me so hard that it hurt. They backed away.

Other women would occasionally get his impish smirk, not realizing what kind of danger that meant ... he was the embodiment of "cute but psycho", and he looked at other people like they were toys. But he looked at me like I was the only other soul in the room, and his soft smile was only for me. 

We spent a night in the most stunning hotel room even though we weren't VIPs (perks of being witches - everything is only one selfish spell away). The white sheets were ruined with more of my blood every time he made love to me, whispering sweet nothings in my ear. 

He was enchanted by every moment of having his own witch to touch freely. Not just any witch, but one with enough magic in her blood to sate him. For all his life until now, people instinctively recoiled from his hand. He was born a siphon, draining others of their essence like a sieve. Every time he touched or even breathed me now, it gave him an ecstatic high like nothing else and made him practically invincible. His caress felt like heroin in my veins - euphoric and warm, floating and melting. He is heaven for no one else but me, and I'll sustain him as long as I breathe.

This is what we were.

Broken, and beautiful, scarce, and lovely. 

And at last, both full of invisible light.


	2. Breaking Kai Parker

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bonnie and Kai have a Handfasting (a witches' wedding).

Chapter II. "Breaking Kai Parker" 

"But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?" - Mark Twain.

Part 2. "Dark Dreamscapes"

Kai Parker and I had returned to Mystic Falls and settled easily into living together. 

I did not have an inheritance to live off like the Salvatores did, and if Kai's family had any money, it did not matter because he was disowned.

So I worked part-time as a waitress at a small diner on the outskirts of town, and Kai had become rather good at earning money as a day trader. He was able to do it from his phone, and he had a magical advantage. It helped that the Bennett house was paid off, so there was no mortgage and our bills were otherwise very low; we rarely used heat or electricity because I liked lighting the fireplace with my eyes, and we both hated artificial lights because they were generally uglier than the natural.

My mind had settled comfortably into this new existence. When I went to work at the diner for the early morning shift, I actually looked forward to going. I did not care for being important or highly paid, I just liked the slow early-morning pace and the fact that I could do a lot of writing there. Often, I was content to just people-watch. 

Kai always picked me up after work, and I never failed to find it remarkable how easily the sight of his familiar face filled me with internal warmth. He often pulled me close to wrap his arms around me, inhaling deeply as he trailed his nose from the crook of my neck to my temple. He breathed a lock of my hair, loving the faint smell of apple shampoo.

He was drawing energy from me, siphoning it from the core of being and into his own. His eyelashes grazed my skin, and my legs became weak. 

"You are literally better than cocaine to me," he exhaled. 

"And you're my heroin," I smiled.

We liked to compare the effect we had on each other to these drugs as a private joke, but we both knew how true it really was. 

...

Kai Parker and I lay entwined that night.

We were sinking into a fluffy white bed, with silvery moonlight filtering through our gently closed eyelids as it beamed down on us. I clung to his cool, clammy skin and my hip-length hair tangled around us both, sticking to our skins in the bluish midnight air. 

To a casual observer, we looked deeply asleep. But in reality, neither of us actually slept. Kai was awake with closed eyes and racing thoughts, and we had become so psychically linked that I could hear them. 

Earlier that day, he heard that Alaric and his sister Josie were getting married tomorrow... and that Josie was already pregnant with twins. Other than his recollection of these facts, his thoughts whirled like tangled fragments in a stream: 

The nightmarish image of his father, smiling as he watched Kai lose his powers.

His unnamed, dead mother recoiling from him in a bedroom long ago.

A house full of Gemini witches in his childhood home with their eyes strangely averted from him, as if something terrible would happen if they looked at him. 

Stronger than these dreamy images were the emotions they evoked.

When Kai thought of his mother, his heart became as cold as ice - as if he had frozen her out forever.

When he thought of his siblings, he recognized them with a strange inner distance - as if they were people from another dimension, who had nothing to do with him.

His father was the most difficult one to process of all.

Out of this jumble of thoughts, Kai drew the conclusion that he must kill Josie tomorrow. 

My blood ran cold with silent fury at the knowledge of what Kai was going to do. 

I observed my thoughts as I tried to steady myself, breathing in and out with deeply controlled breaths. And for a moment, I was shocked by how selfish my thoughts were. 

I was upset because Kai was going to keep ruining his own soul. He still did not realize that his soul was not merely his own thing to dirty up and condemn to hell - I felt like his soul was at least partially mine, and he was being reckless with it. When we died, I fully expected to see him in the next plane of existence, and not be parted from him because he had a debt to pay in hell. But he was clearly not even thinking of his redemption, which was our future. 

I was also upset because I was not enough for him. Even without being the head of the Gemini coven, he would still have me. I gave him potent magic, always. 

I could not believe that he truly felt in competition with Josie and her unborn children for a power that had not really changed his life, now that he had it. He was still here in Mystic Falls, and still an outcast among his family. All we had lately was each other, and he would have me with or without magic. He was willing to throw away forever, over... what exactly? 

I did not believe that all of this was just so he could be the head of the Gemini coven. Josie's children would not even come of age to merge for a decade or more, so there was no logical reason to kill them right now, before even being born. 

I decided not to work myself up about it anymore. I did not understand the "Kai logic" of this vendetta against his family, and I would probably never understand it. 

But I didn't need to understand, I just needed to stop him. 

...

I woke up before he did that morning, careful not to wake him as I slunk out of bed to run a bath. It was 6am. 

My bathroom was a tiny, enclosed space with an old porcelain sink, toilet, and bathtub. Even the window was tiny, but it filled the bathroom with more than enough light. 

The old floral robin’s egg blue wallpaper was peeling and yellowing, and the ivory tile on the floor was shifting and molding - but these things did not bother me, because the water pressure was heavy and the hot water quickly turned the room into a private sauna. The room was bare except for a tiny wooden crucifix hanging on the wall, a gift from my distant father. 

The steam was so thick that I could hardly breathe or see my own body. Being enveloped in a thickly white, warm mist was comforting to me. I never bothered to turn the light on, because the window was positioned perfectly to catch the superior morning light. 

I sat in the water and closed my eyes. I was going to attempt dreamwalking for the first time. 

I had to fall asleep while still holding on to a sliver of my consciousness, like a lucid dreamer. Then I could walk the dreamscape like a map.

I had only one mission: convince Kai to spare Josie, through his dreams.

I did not believe his mind could be swayed while he was awake once it was so firmly made up, but everyone's subconscious is more open to suggestion.

The gateway into Kai's inner world appeared to me as an oxblood door set into the sloping, misty lilac landscape of my own dream. It stood alone, like a door to nowhere. 

I opened it, stepping over the threshold of a remembered version of Kai's childhood home. Night had fallen in his dream, and the house was silent. I wandered quietly through the corridors for a while, searching for Kai, until I finally found a very young version of him sleeping in his old bedroom. He shared a bedroom with Josie, who was soundly asleep on the other side of the room.

I smiled when I saw them both. Their faces were faintly illuminated by a night light plugged into the wall between their beds. 

At this point in time, Kai's straight hair was shaggy like Damon's, and a stray lock fell over one eye. His skin was pale and smooth, because no stubble had grown there yet. He was sleeping in a tee shirt with horizontal stripes. Josie was a heavy sleeper in a white nightgown, snoring with her lips slightly parted.

I giggled to myself, wondering if she still snored like that around Alaric.

I started exploring the memory of their bedroom. I was like a ghost in this memory, so none of them could hear or see me.

Suddenly, the door clicked open. 

Kai's robed father appeared in the doorway, wearing a pair of black leather gloves. He walked through me, past the deeply sleeping Josie, and sat on the bed beside his son. Kai's eyes fluttered almost imperceptibly, and I realized that he was now pretending to sleep. 

I focused on his gloved hands, one resting on his knee and the other resting heavily on his son's sleeping shoulder.

I tried to understand why he was wearing the gloves. It did not make sense for him to wear them in the middle of the night, as everyone slept. He probably suspected that Kai was a siphon, and the gloves gave him a degree of protection. But I still could not imagine why he would need them right now, because Kai was asleep and not touching him. 

Then he ran his gloved fingers gently along the side of Kai's face, in a lingering way that made me profoundly uncomfortable.

He bent over to whisper something in Kai's ear, in such a low voice that I did not catch what he said. Kai opened his eyes groggily, clearly not wanting get up but too withdrawn to argue either. He followed his father quietly out of the room, and I trailed behind them.

His father opened a door at the end of the hall. It was a study, complete with softly lit reading laps and wall to wall shelves brimming with books on the occult; which was a fairly normal thing, for a family of witches. 

Kai lingered outside the room, after his father was already inside. He turned to look at me over his shoulder with a lock of hair still falling over one perceptive, dark hazel eye - suddenly revealing that he could see me. 

"Don't watch," he said. 

"Kai," his father called from inside the study. 

And then I understood. 

When Kai obediently entered the study and closed the door behind himself, I did not follow him. I wanted to run as far away as possible, so I ran down the stairs. 

Time is a funny thing in dreams. As I descended the stairs, I could see the sun rising through a window because the night was slipping past us like sand in a one-minute hourglass. By the time I entered the kitchen, dawn had broken and Kai's mother was already in the kitchen, cooking breakfast. 

Children filtered into the kitchen one by one, and Kai was the last of them to come downstairs. He was slightly overdressed for the hot, sunny weather in a hunter green military jacket.

I noticed that the others, including Josie to his left, sat angled slightly away from him. I assumed this must have something to do with him being a siphon - they did not want to accidentally bump elbows with him or touch his hand. But Kai seemed unconcerned with this. He absently raised a hand to touch his neck. He did not seem to notice when his mother took her seat at the foot of the table, far from him. 

His eyes were open but vacant, and I could tell that his attention was focused inward. He hadn't yet said a word to anyone, and there was some tension in his jaw. As I studied him, I noticed that his neck was red. It would have been an easy thing to miss, because he was wearing the jacket specifically to obscure others' view of his neck. But I was familiar with that gesture, of compulsively raising a hand to feel if your neck was still tender. I had done it all day, after a grown up version of Kai had tightened his belt around my neck in the bathroom of this same house. 

Kai's father was the last family member to enter the kitchen, dressed for work. He stopped to kiss his wife on the cheek. Kai had not yet looked at his father, but his jaw tightened when he entered the room. But Kai had calmed himself down by the time his father took his seat at the head of the table, right beside him. 

Young, fair-haired Luke asked Kai to pass him maple syrup from across the table. Instantly, he snapped back into the present and became as much of a participant in the family dynamic as he was allowed to be. But I noticed two things:

One - his smiles were fake. 

Two - he did not under any circumstance look at his father, and his father did not acknowledge him now either. 

I wanted to pull out of this dream now, but I didn't know how to wake myself up. So I had no choice but to wait patiently, leaning against the wall like an uninvited fly. 

When all of the children cleared out of the house to go to school, I witnessed a conversation between Kai's parents. 

"I'm worried about him," she said. "Why does he have to lash out in such a way? Making up these bizarre stories about you, even harming himself, and now he won't even speak to me anymore... its almost as if he blames us for his genetic defect and now wants to accuse us of every outlandish thing under the sun!" She looked troubled, and frustrated with things. She furrowed her dark brows as she stirred at her coffee in small but quick, agitated movements.

"We just have to ignore him when he's like that," his father sighed convincingly. "He will stop, eventually." 

"I suppose I have no choice. I hate arguing with him. He makes me so angry lately that I lose my temper, and say things I don't really mean. I called him a mistake..." Her voice faltered.

"But you really meant the defect," his father said gently. "Not him, right?"

"Well of course, but he doesn't know that." 

"Just wait for the right time to tell him, then. You'll set it right." 

She nodded. 

As I watched his parents embrace, my heart swelled with questions about what I had just witnessed here. All of their children, including Kai, had left the house before this conversation began. So how could he remember it?

Was this a true piece of his dead mother's history that he had picked up psychically, or was her promise to set things right just a dream conjured up by her son's subconscious wish?

I did not know the answer to that specific question. But I understood this about Kai: 

Every single one of his most atrocious actions was driven by a singular desire to win an awful game his father had started playing with him long ago. He wanted to take everything away from his father, isolating him from any shred of power or love that he possessed... because that is what had been done to him. Kai was so detached from other people that he did not really see them; his father was like the enemy king on a chess board, and all the other pieces could be sacrificed if it meant capturing the king. 

Being head of the Gemini coven meant very little to him in and of itself - it was only a battle trophy. He did not feel enough for Josie to either love or hate her. She was such a nonentity to him that he almost forgot she was there until she was an obstacle, because all he could see was this: he would never again let his father have the satisfaction of knowing his weakness, that he could be broken. And if he was no longer the head of the Gemini coven, his father would surely kill him. 

My head hurt, and my heart was broken... and it was completely my fault. 

I loved Kai, but I had taken his deepest sorrow upon myself and I did not know how to carry it properly. It felt like a physical thing that I could easily mishandle and drop, to watch it shatter like glass on the floor. 

How would it feel to have someone break into my dreams and find my heart of glass in their arrogant, shaking, foolish hands?

Would it make any difference if I loved that person? 

I was reminded of the time when I started practicing dark magic under the tutelage of professor Shane, too blinded by my own hubris to see that some things should not be fixed with magic.

I knew I should not have come here, but I did not know how to stop the process one it had begun. 

The past is never truly gone, because it is inexorably woven into our being.

It lives in us at a biological level, pulsing in the brain cells of our long-term memory and swimming uncontrollably in our subconscious, until we gradually return to dust. 

...

I woke up in the bathtub, withdrawn from the world of dreams and memories. I felt terrible and cold, despite being submerged in steaming hot water. 

I had not achieved my mission, because I had not uttered a word about not killing anyone tomorrow. 

And I had gotten more than either of us bargained for when I entered Kai's dream. 

I sat in the water for one more hour - thinking and not thinking, seeing and not seeing - until it was over. Blanking out like this clears the mind after heavy psychic work... or trauma.

I wrapped myself in an old robe and left the bathroom, hit by a wall of cool air. 

In the bedroom, my clothes were already laid out on near a modest, dark wooden vanity on the wall. An antique silver brush and my red diary from our prison world were the only things on the vanity.

There were strong, warm winds coming in through the sheer white curtains, making them billow gracefully in the air. The gentle light that peeked through them was beautiful. I walked to the window just to smell the air.

It smelled of smoke and coffee and tires.

I could see the ground outside through the window. I imagined what it would feel like to be on the precipice of jumping out of it, balancing myself on its edge, about to make an irreversible decision. I was not suicidal, only curious.

I felt Kai's presence behind me before I felt his hands wrap around my body and press me against him.

"I understand if you're upset with me," I said. "But it wasn't on purpose. I was only there to try to convince you subconsciously not to kill Josie today. But I've never dreamwalked anyone before, and it wasn't as easy to control the dream as I thought it would be."

He did not reply. 

Nervously, I turned to face him. He was right there, but I could see in his eyes that he was distancing himself from the present... and from me. 

I had inadvertently done something very invasive, and terrible. I had betrayed him, even though I did not mean to. 

Thinking quickly and desperately, I said, "Take the memory away from me. You have the power to make me forget." 

He blinked, looking directly at me now. 

"Its easy," I urged. "You already know the spell." 

He did not say anything, only cupped the side of my face in his hand. I closed my eyes. 

"I could damage your brain," he hesitated. 

"I am willing to pay that price," I said. 

"You won't remember this, but I'll say it to you anyway. You can help me just by loving me, and having faith in me." 

"I'm sorry," I cried. "I just didn't understand..." 

"Understanding is the reward of faith, not the cause of it." 

A moment passed. There was intense eye contact and deep silence, and then... nothing. 

Because of its usefulness, Kai frequently used the Motus spell to move physical matter. Our memories also have a physical compartment - they dwell in their own little cells in our brains, and when those cells die, the memories they carried are lost with them. Physically taking the memory is the only way a witch can "compel" a person to forget. 

Compulsion is imperfect, because it is reversible. Elena had once asked Alaric to compel her to forget about Damon when she thought he was lost, but now she had them all back. Because those memories were still living in her brain - repressed by compulsion, but still there nonetheless. 

I, on the other hand, could never retrieve my lost memories. 

When I opened my eyes, I saw Kai looking down at me. I did not remember how I had gotten there. In fact, I did not remember anything that happened between yesterday afternoon and now. 

"Kai... how did I get here? I don't remember... Why can't I remember..." I started to panic. 

"Shhh," he said. "Calm down. You can't remember anything because I've given you a lobotomy," he smirked. 

I stared incredulously at him. "Are you going to tell me why you did that?" 

"Nope." 

It bothered me that he knew something about me that I did not know. Meanwhile, I only knew of him what he revealed to me willingly, with knowledge and control. 

His kiss was dizzying, so I willed myself to let go of the fact that I did not remember most of the last 24 hours and would never get it back. It was surprisingly easy, like remembering not to cry tears over spilled milk. Because the present felt eternal, and I would live suspended in his arms forever if given the choice. I did not know everything, but the following thought struck me with conviction: Love, not knowledge, is responsible for about ninety percent of whatever genuine happiness exists in my life. 

He took my hands inside of his and led me to the bed. 

He laid me down and slid the long robe above my waist. 

I lay on the bed beneath him. His hands appraised my body, leaving tingles where they  
passed. I was intoxicated with his scent - an ambrosia of mint, black opium, and sharp wood.

My heart skipped a beat at the familiar sound of Kai unbuckling his pants.

  
I felt his penis with my hand, tracing the details of his veins. I knelt in front of him, pressing the head of his cock to my lips. He tilted his head back when I enveloped him with my mouth.   
He swayed in and out of my mouth slowly at first, but his pumps built up speed and force with time. He built himself up until he lifted me up onto the bed, where he kissed me and drained me so deeply that there was almost nothing left of my essence to take; all of this while sliding himself against my clitoris and outer lips, building up more desire than my body could contain. Eventually, he submerged himself between my legs, filling me up completely.  
We made love with as much flow and wetness as the sea. And when it ended, we crashed like tidal wives amidst a storm that was somehow violent and peaceful at once.

Josie and Alaric had a beautiful wedding that evening. Their father had suspiciously driven his car into a lake on the drive back home. 

...

Part 3. "The Handfasting."

We were in the ruins of a chapel in the woods. Blackened by time and fire, with tall candles placed everywhere under the collapsed dome ceiling, it was completely open to the sky. Kai stood hand in hand with me under a twilit sky, dressed in dark clothing, and I wore my favorite dress. It was dusky ecru, with thin straps and a low neckline that draped gently over the breasts. The fabric was airy, like linen. It caressed my body without being distastefully tight, gracing the peaks of my breasts and resting against the sharp contours of my hip bones. The fabric flowed to the middle of my thigh, and ended there. It was so simple that it looked austere, and pure. My hair, which had continued to grow with time and magic, billowed around me like a spun curtain ending at my fingertips. I wore slouchy knee socks and a simple pair of chuck shoes. 

My collar looked beautiful. The silver, heart-shaped lock dangling from the thin ornate collar glinted in the candle-light. I was to wear it forever.

We slit our palms before clasping them together, mingling our blood. There was so much blood that it soaked our newly minted silver rings, seeping under them. We tied red ribbons around our wrists and hands beautifully, creating a bond that was both symbolic and as real as death - because this ribbon was spelled with five simple words, "till death do us part." When our ribbon was untied, its magic spent on our blood, Kai kissed me deeply. We locked eyes for a lingering moment, and my heart skipped a few beats. Although he was exactly the same except for the silver ring around his finger, this felt wonderful and new.

Even knowing his capacity sin against me, the world, and himself because he was fallen... I promised to never let go of his hand  
Even knowing my capacity to sin against him, the world, and myself because I am fallen... He promised to never let go of my hand, in return.

We made love under the stars that night, with the peculiar sort of magic that comes from wedding your souls together for all eternity coursing through our shared veins. It did not matter what kind of birth control I had taken that morning because through this magic, we conceived a new life.

And then we walked to our car in the afterglow, feeling almost high - the breezy, autumnal walk was more beautiful than it had been before, somehow. The world is full of magic that patiently lies in wait for our senses to sharpen and become aware of it. Becoming one with each other had given us a heightened sense of awareness, and we were quietly amazed by things. For instance, Kai pointed out a distant cavern on the moon. I could see it with my naked eyes, and could not help but stare at it because it was alive: fields of energy pulsated into the cavern, and we could both see it. We were growing suspicious of the moon. A man passing us on the sidewalk looked at us like we were drug addicts, but we did not care.

(I found out much later that we had just been awakened to a new layer of reality, which we could never unsee: fields of raw magic encapsulated and permeated all entities, both living and dead). Even as I slipped into our open-air Jeep, my eyes were still fixed on the aura of the moon.

I was overcome with the realization that our story had only just begun. Everything leading up to this point was only prologue, and here began the greatest adventure that we would ever undertake together: 

"Now, we must help each other get to heaven." 

"But first we dance," he grinned. "There's a rave going in a warehouse outside of town." 

"But I can't do anything fun there, like drink myself insane or take mushrooms. I'm pregnant, remember?" 

"That is exactly why my plan is perfect, Bonnie," he said. "One of us has to drive back home." 


End file.
